One Family

Little People, Big Dreams

Year 5

Welcome to Year 5- the year we transition into Upper Key Stage 2!

 Our move ‘up the stairs’ means we are growing up! This is our penultimate primary school year and we intend to make the most of every minute of it!

Full immersion…

Like in other year groups across school, we LOVE it when our learning all links together as it helps us to make vital links, joins and connections between the knowledge we acquire. Our teachers in Year 5 love to engage us fully in our new topics each half term, especially if it involves us all dressing up! Our lessons hook us so much that we KNOW we are going to love each topic and gain so much from it.

Books, books, books…

Books are at the heart of our English curriculum. Our texts are carefully selected to give us a range of reading experiences, from a wealth of genres and authors. This helps us to embed our learning in other areas of the curriculum and develop our vocabulary bank, since the books we use are so rich in language. During our Whole Class Reading sessions, we use quality fiction, non-fiction and poetry to transport us to other worlds and to help us become proficient readers with a breadth of materials. Each day, we use carefully planned resources to help us to develop our reading skills as well as our fluency and stamina.

 

In addition to the rich language we meet in our class-texts, we explore how words are formed and where they originate from, learning a bank of root words to broaden out bank further. Revision and recall is paramount to embedding this knowledge and so we regularly revisit vocabulary we have learnt to ensure it sticks! We leave Year 5 with a bank of high-utility language at our finger-tips that we can use in conversation and in our writing, across the curriculum.

Our maths vision…

Our mathematics’ vision is to promote curiosity, enjoyment and a love and thirst for challenge and learning. It is ambitious and creative, empowering us to become independent, resilient and successful mathematicians. We strive to develop a life-long love of learning mathematics and the skills to play an active, creative and responsible role in society.

 

Maths learning in Year 5, just like every other year group, ensures that we gain both mathematical fluency and the ability to apply our skills to reasoning-based problems. We use online platforms (Conquer Maths and Times Table Rockstars) to supplement our work in school and to ensure we constantly revisit maths facts to embed them further.

 

Y5 is a very important year for maths with lots of new content to be learnt.  There is a heavy emphasis on fractions, decimals, and percentages which is a big focus in the KS2 Year 6 SATSs These mathematical objectives cover up to a whopping 75% of questions on the papers (along with number and place value.)    

Helping at home…

We work incredibly hard at school and so down-time with family is very important. However, since we are now in the latter stages of KS2, we know we also need to begin to develop the organisational skills needed for secondary school. At home, we can utilise the online platforms of Conquer Maths and Read Theory to support our learning, since we know that the more we do at home, the more confident we will be in class and the greater our chance of success.

 

We also know that reading for 20-30 minutes a day is so vitally important. The difference 30 minutes makes to our proficiency is PROFOUND! This could be independent reading or reading with an adult, or using online platforms. Our lives are so incredibly busy but we must prioritise this skill, as being a successful reader unlocks so many doors- not just now but in our future lives.

Writing...

In Year 5 and 6, we have an extensive writing toolkit at our disposal. We have learnt many skills and sentence types over our primary school career, and regular DART has meant that we have them to hand every time we write. Just like in other year groups, we explore genres and what they look like; what features they contain and what their purpose is. Once we have done this, we can find sentence-types and vocabulary that fit our purpose of entertaining, persuading, informing or discussing. We use quality texts and drama sessions to explore new and challenging vocabulary so that we never face a blank page with the dreaded ‘writer’s block!’ We of our drafting and editing skills as we go, as we know that author’s never produce their final and best version first time round!

Year 5 Teachers

Mrs Stockwell

Mr Kerr

Mr Stanbridge

Miss Olley

Autumn Term

Pharaohs

We will be travelling back 5,000 years to the dusty realms of ancient Egypt. We will cruise along the Nile (hypothetically of course) entering a world of mysteries, curses and mummies. With the help of Mr Egypt (a real life Egyptologist, who lives in Egypt) we will be unravelling the secrets of ancient tombs using historical resources and ancient age-old artefacts – some over 4000 years old! We will also be looking for an apprentice who will work for Ramose (he’s our chief embalmer) to help prepare a body for its journey to the afterlife. Who will write the most gruesome set of instructions on how to prepare the body?

Stargazers

The second half term’s learning is a Science-based topic all about Space. We will be taking part in a recreation of the Moon landing and interviewing astronauts (we don’t want to give too much away!) for our newspaper. We will also study the planets; what causes day and night; the effect of gravity and the seasons. In Literacy, we will create our own non-chronological report and write descriptively about a fictional planet and the creatures living there.

Spring Term 

Peasants, Princes and Pestilence:

This medieval topic starts in gruesome fashion! We won’t spoil anything by giving too much away…

We use this topic to assist our writing, which, in the past, has resulted in making some horrific plague cures of our own. In addition to this, we have also tried to personify pestilence and write an explanation text about how the plague spread.
It’s not only our writing we have involved our topic in. As part of our D.T. work, we have designed and made plague doctor masks from a range of materials.

Beast Creator

Beast Creator, evolution and the Outdoors: The children start off Spring 2 with a topic all about Darwin’s theory of evolution, the idea of ‘survival of the fittest’ and the creatures which inhabit our planet! We will encourage children to wonder about why some creatures died out and how creatures adapt and change according to their habitats. We will be looking at how creatures are classified, their behaviours and their changes (metamorphis) and the reproduction of some plants and animals. We also like to have a range of real creatures growing inside our classroom!

Summer Term

Alchemy Island

Scream Machine

Homework

Homework is a very important part of Year 5. We need to get into the good routine of being organised and independent learners, with the self-reliance needed to hand things in promptly and to a good standard. We expect children to use Read Theory and Conquer Maths routinely throughout the week, as well as completing one task on their Reading Log.

Latest Year 5 News

Year 5 – What We Did This Week W/B 16/10/2023

Year 5 – What We Did This Week W/B 16/10/2023

This week, we have got stuck into our new class novel, Secrets of a Sun King by Emma Carroll. We have so much knowledge about our Egyptian topic already that we are making confident and astute predictions about the plot of the text- and we are only two chapters in!...

Year 5 – What We Did This Week W/B 09/10/2023

Year 5 – What We Did This Week W/B 09/10/2023

In amongst our assessments this week, we have still managed to harness our creativity and fun. We took part in a series of Harry Potter lessons with Luna Lovegood and Johnny Duddle (the illustrator of the Potter series). We were tasked with writing a setting...